Update On Wall Street Protests

A reader posted the following comment regarding the Occupy Wall Street protests:

I am so proud of all you people who are showing your back bones, to stand up and put a stop to the Banking cartel, who is defining History, by insisting that We The People, use their Fiat Money system. Our Constitution states, that Only Gold and Silver shall be used as lawful Money. The So Called Federal Government, is really only to have Ten Square Miles, in which to conduct their so called wisdom to Protect the Sovereign States. But look at how much territory they call, Federal lands etc. We Have a rouge Government, which is completely out of control. Your movements of collective peaceful protests, are the beginning of the end for the crooked Fiat Money people. I am a WWII Vet, South Pacific Campaign. 94 years young, handy capped, from War Injuries. I want you to know from my Heart, I am so proud of each and every one of you. So Hang in there, your movement is just what this Country needs.

I’m not certain whether the reader is one of these gentlemen attending the Occupy Wall Street protests:

Oath Keepers sees good reason to stand in the streets with these awakening souls and protect their right to free speech, to peacefully assemble, and to redress their grievances to their government, as the Constitution prescribes for all Americans. That is one thing. Another facet of our initiative is to use these public gatherings to reach and teach many who now hunger for the truth – we can show them how the Constitution will protect them better than an oversized, bloated Federal behemoth hell-bent on controlling every aspect of each citizen’s life.

To point this out to the masses, Oath Keepers is organizing a joint effort along with Alex Jones of Infowars dot com (who himself called for an Occupy the Fed movement); Steven Vincent of End The Fed; Danny Panzella’s Truth Squad TV; Brandon Smith of Alt-Mkt.com; Gary Franch of Restore The Republic; and others as quickly as we can contact them. Remember Bob Dwyer, the guy who started the first Tea Party to launch the Ron Paul revolution? He’s in. The forces of Constitutional rule of law must muster now to deflect the bile being belched forth by the socialist/statist extremists …. Oath Keepers has the message American youth need. If we do not go out into the street and give them the truth, can we really say we’re still honoring our Oath?

When a corporation becomes larger than is useful, and seeks to concentrate financial power into the political and governmental spheres, its likeness is no longer the King Snake, but instead is more like a Rattlesnake. At a point we call such corps “Monopoly Capitalists”. By the time a grouping of such Monopoly Capitalist corps are setting U.S. foreign policy, which the arms industry certainly does nowadays, the problem becomes unbearably apparent. Bechtel comes to mind, along with Halliburton, the Carlyle Group, Monsanto, General Electric, et al.

That part of Wall Street is certainly to blame. But that is not “Capitalism”. Instead, it is “Monopoly Capitalism”, and it is now observably moving America into a new world order with intent to place America under the alleged authority of a one-world government. As such, Monopoly Capitalism is un-Constitutional and must be opposed.

While Michael Moore says that capitalism itself is the problem, Mr. Moore is wrong. As I’ve previously noted:

When Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought about Western civilization, he answered:

If people want to criticize capitalism and propose an alternative, that is fine . . . but only if they understand what free market capitalism is and acknowledge that America has not practiced free market capitalism for some time.

***

People pointing to the Western economies and saying that capitalism doesn’t work is as incorrect as pointing to Stalin’s murder of millions of innocent people and blaming it on socialism. Without the government’s creation of the too big to fail banks, Fed’s intervention in interest rates and the markets, government-created moral hazard emboldening casino-style speculation, corruption of government officials, creation of a system of government-sponsored rating agencies which had at its core a model of bribery, and other government-induced distortions of the free market, things wouldn’t have gotten nearly as bad.

As Justice Louis Brandeis said:

In a government of laws, the existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipotent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. If government becomes a lawbreaker it breeds contempt for law: it invites every man to become a law unto himself. It invites anarchy.

If there has been lawlessness and corruption among Wall Street players, it was partially simply modeling the lawlessness and corruption of the Executive Branch and Congress members. I’ve written elsewhere about how the government lied by saying Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was behind 9/11 (when he didn’t and wasn’t), that we don’t torture (when we did), that we don’t spy on Americans (when we did), etc. Just like kids model what their parents do as well as what they say, Wall Street modeled the unlawful and corrupt actions of our government employees.

Being against capitalism because of the mess we’ve gotten in would be like Gandhi saying that he is against Western civilization because of the way the British behaved towards India.

Oath Keepers is planning to “Occupy The Fed Now!” and publicize this to remind the Occupy Wall Street people that the Fed is the source problem, without which the Wall Street criminals would be set back a hundred years. I will be posting our press release and a longer list of groups and orgs who will be joining Oath Keepers in this initiative.

We are currently drawing up our press release regarding our own response to the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon, which will be Oath Keepers’ official statement. We are now planning an official Oath Keepers project which we’ve named “Occupy The Fed Now!”.

Yes, Oath Keepers has seen the need to block the attempted takeover of the populist movement generally referred to as Occupy Wall Street.

In an extensive phone conference on the evening of October 04, 2011, we heard from Oath Keepers who have attended Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Boston, Occupy Los Angeles, and Occupy Seattle. The overall consensus from our people at these rallies is that most people attending the rallies are very open-minded to the Oath Keepers mission/message, and that they are hungry for answers. Indeed, our reports indicate that many Americans right now are awakening, in droves it seems, and they are full of questions for which we have the answer – the Constitution for the united States of America.

While progressives might assume that the Fed has helped the economy from getting worse, or that the importance of ending the Fed is being overhyped, top economists and financial experts disagree. See this, this and this.

As I pointed out Monday, whatever people think the government should do, the D.C. politicos have actually been a large part of the problem:

And while co-option of government by the big banks is a huge problem, it is also true that corruption in government leads to corruption in the private sector. See this and this. The U.S. has truly become a banana republic, just like the worst Latin American countries.

So anyone who thinks that government would solve all of our problems if it were only freed from obstructionists is only seeing half the problem, and is falling for the oldest trick in the book … the ole’ divide and conquer strategy.

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Thanks for reminding us of a real and present danger. JUST SAY NO TO TOFU, AND AVOID OMEGA-6!

Lol - the ongoing chemical castration of the developed world may indeed be playing into the modern Fourth Turning, but with the Big Crash there may just be an opportunity for women to bear infant men again. All nefarious plans contain the germ of their undoing.

Viagra is the most counterfeited pharma drug on the planet. Where is all this demand coming from?

I can assure you that not one iota of demand is coming from me. If anything, I appear to have the opposite condition and have been on the lookout (much to the chagrin of my lady friends, I might add) for some medication, balm or poultice that might alleviate the rabid tumescence. In the meantime, I'm making do with cold-showers and, when the need arises (quite often, unfortunately), strategically-placed ice-packs.

I just got back from the rally at the Dallas Fed that was organized by us Ron Paul supporters and attended by Alex Jones who was there with his bullhorn egging on the crowd. The Occupy Wall Street Dallas crowd was a few blocks away, and a good many came by and attended our rally. We had about 600 to 700 people right outside the fed -maybe about 800 if you count all the police and government agents ther. Jones was great as usual. A lot of us have been at the Occupy dallas festivitties the last couple of days. There are mixed feelings about them, but most us us understand the need for all these anti-Fed anti-Wall Street groups to work together against a common enemy.

Genius though. Who doesn't hate the banks and the Wall Street and corporate bailouts? Or should I say, corruption. Everyone hates corruption, folks on the left, center, and right. Capitalism without the rule of law is crony capitalism. Corruption.

Ah. but that's not what is really going on here. At the center of this inclusive protest are the creators and sponsors. Radical leftist, socialist, marxists. Yeah, they kicked it off. It's gaining momentum. And yeah, the momentum is attracting all sorts of groups, even conservative groups.

I am an Oath Keeper, and can confirm the Oath Keepers are organizing an "Occupy the Fed" protest. I absolutely disapprove their decision to join this broader movement. Fired off an email to the OKs immediately.

Make no mistake. The radical leftist, socialist, marxist revolutionaries that founded and sponsor this event are not protesting corruption. They are protesting CAPITALISM. But, many of those who've joined don't know that. Useful idiots.

Caution to those conservative groups joining the larger "Occupy" movement. For every 10 fun-loving, curious, pie-thowing protestors there patiently lurks one bomb-throwing leftist radical. Who do you think will get blamed after that first bomb explodes? That's correct: The conservative groups who were duped into joining the fray. But, blame that's just the back-up plan.

The real plan, from the leftist revolutionary playbook, is to encourage, watch, and wait. Wait for the crowd to get big. Then, eventually someone will get hurt. Someone will get trampled. Someone will over react. Someone will misinterpret an action. Then come the fireworks---tear gas, water hoses, curfew, rubber bullets, molotov cocktails, property damage, and gun shots. All according to the leftist revolution playbook. These folks are genius at revolutions. Do not underestimate their prowess. They cannot get what they want without violent revolution.

To what law are you referring? Any law that interferes with voluntary transactions between individuals negates capitalism. As Rothbard said anarchy and capitalism are the same thing, you can't have one without the other.

Adherence to natural law is necessary in the commission of all human actions but governmental laws can only curtail free association whether they stop you from marrying whom you want to marry or if they stop you from trading with those whom you wish to trade.

Most of us did get "trampled" in the "big short." If I follow your thinking. Me too. All my family members. Friends. I was pissed as hell. After learning the root causes of this unfolding economic Depression, I got more pissed. Pissed at the Fed, the politicians, the courts, administrations past and present, fractional reserve banking, fiat currency, our education system, etc. And pissed at myself.

You are not alone in your suffering. And if you were in my circle of activity I would offer my help. Because that's what a moral and free people do for one another. We help each other.

My oath. I will stand alone and against all enemies with my oath if I have to.

I'm an atheist and I have to say that I agree with most of what FK is saying in this thread. I see ethical behavior as a rational act but I am willing to work along side of those who find a spiritual basis for their principles.

substantially true. But why get caught in the web of your opponents semantical tricks? Identifying oneself as "conservative" in this era of post Neo-con Trotskyite hijacking of the 'so called' right is just like painting a target on one's face. There are no leftists or rightists anymore, you're either a statist or anti-statist.

Statists seek to impose the burden of "original sin" onto all those who seek to improve the world by improving themselves, anti-statists forgo acceptance of that doctrine by proving through action that the best way to 'help' others is by helping oneself. One group seeks value through production, the other through appropriation. ..the essence of Amerika's dilemma is the deliberate mis-identification of which group is which.

Ironically, the globalists aim of undermining the nation-state is a ploy to remove the protection gained by individuals who seek the benefits of free association reached via collective agreement.

Since your "federal" government has been hijacked and turned into a WMD against it's citizens, the only recourse is to return all fighting forces to American soil, direct State National Guard units to disarm and demobilize all tentacles of the "federal" octopus,(include all three letter acronymns here) and use the legislative assemblies to impeach and remove all governors who refuse to perform said duty to their peoples.

Yes, they are 'geniuses'....but they fear the power of an armed citizenry equipped with the will to make their state monopoly capitalist cartel "wither away."

Remove them now or be crushed under their heels. Everything else(including wandering the streets looking for a media opportunity) is smoke n mirrors.

"Embrace the Truth" is right. With all your might. Occupy Wall Street is the beginning of the nationwide destabilizing social unrest many of us at ZH have been expecting. This is just the beginning. Prepare accordingly.

18% of the country 'strongly approves' of the job Obama is doing. The radicals in OWS are a sliver of that group; they and their mindset have very little support among the general population. So how do they steer the debate, ultimately? Is there some kind of proclomation they will vote on, whereupon constitutionalists will fold their cause and agree to socialism? Or are they already changing the minds of people previously committed to a free market? Everyone has heard every bit of their rhetoric a thousand times, and people think what they think. But _our side_ has not had a public hearing. This is a megaphone - we can try to use it to promote liberty, or we can surrender it to the bankers' useful idiots. Think.

The protest is in the right place, and the problem isn't so much the people who are there, as it is the people who are not there. And that problem seems to be lessening with time.

The protest is not in the right place. This is how I know that. Peaceful protest is a right of we the people. First Ammendment:...or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Curious, don't you think, the protestors are not protesting at the White House, the Capital, or the courts? Those are seats of "Government" to which one might direct their grievances. Why Wall Street? Because the leftist sponsors are "petitioning" CAPITALISM, not the government. The sponsors of Occupy Wall Street intend to directly topple capitalism by hamstringing the seat of capitalism.

The protest is not in the right place. This is how I know that. Peaceful protest is a right of we the people. First Ammendment:...or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.The protest is not in the right place. This is how I know that. Peaceful protest is a right of we the people. First Ammendment:...or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That's an excellent point with superlative documentation. But check this out:

Assembling and protesting the Fed, the Capital, the Post Office, Exxon, or ToysRus is fine. The issue of Occupy Wall Street goes to intention. The intention of any normal protest is to bring attention to a neglected grievance.

The intention of Occupy Wall Street is different. It's nefarious. The intention is to hamstring the day-to-day operation of the stock market, bond market, FX markets on Wall Street. (Remember, the original protest was planned to squat ON Wall Street. The police moved the protestors.) "Occupy's" hope is to disrupt and prevent the daily operation of capital markets. Thereby "innocently" tipping the financial/economic house of cards into collapse.

Moved now away from the daily business conducted on Wall Street, the organizers of the protest hope to enlarge the crowd to the point of inevitable violence. When violence erupts, and Wall Street is affected peripherally, Occupy will end up achieving their intended goal of hamstringing the cogs of capital markets. After all, capitalism is their enemy---"workers of the world unite!"

With respect, your analogy does not work because it lacks important elements.

Here's a working analogy if I may:

The Whore House is bankrupt. It is behind on lease payments to the landlord, and consequently to the bank. All the "whores" except one are unaware the Whore House is bankrupt, sitting on a financial house of cards ready to collapse. Only the madam and one clever ambitious whore know the Whore House is on the verge of collapse.

Our clever whore wants to become the new madam. So, the clever whore riles up the other whores in an uprising demanding more money. However, the whores do not approach the madam; instead, the whores refuse to work, pay rent, and then they march on the landlord.

The march on the landlord's home is so effective, he/she cannot conduct business transactions. The bank calls in the landlord's loan. The landlord fires the ineffective madam. The landlord loses the Whore House.

Now there is no Whore House. Only chaos.

The clever whore visits the bank. She negotiates a new "contract" with the bank. The clever whore becomes the landlord AND the new madam. Whores are working again and payments arrive. All seems well until the whores realize they have NO recourse for future grievances against the madam. To whom will they go? The landlord?

The madam is the banking cartel and the fed. Wall street firms are the bouncers and muscle, and the politician are just high paid whores. We are the people. The madam is sending bouncers into the street. Every person, whether they want their services or not, are forced to take them and pay for them. We're now flaccid, so no part of the arrangement is working for anyone. You want to get into a pissing match with the whores and either 1. Maker her toss your salad (more stimulus/easing) or 2. Make her force all her clients to wear condoms and have one of the bouncers' goon friends watch the act to make sure it doesn't get too rough.

Most of the rest of us want to level the place and go back to free love.

The politicians are the ones with the exclusive right to back up their edicts with violence. Only those at the top of the pyramid can profess such a right. If Wall Street was in charge of things then they would have the power to push their own interests through their own naked power and would not need to bribe politicians.

The government has the power to demand payment for the services it offers in propping up Wall Street and the banks. This does not make the government subservient -- quite the opposite in fact.

You can't really have the banker holding the guns, or the whole things loses the 'color of law'. You have to have bag men do the dirty work. It's all mobbed up, but they have to pretend otherwise.

Let's target both institutions with the same message: end fiat (or rather, open the mint to gold and silver and end the FRN tender monopoly). That's really the only message that will matter in the end. We're going through the wringer, we need to lay the groundwork for a sustainable aftermath, or we're gonna get fiat again and find ourselves on the same old tax farm, where the top exists off the yield from the rest of us. Best to do these things now, so that a medium of exchange is in place to some extent when the dollar collapses. People are ready to listen about money, now.

Fiat's destructive path goes beyond the obvious. It sets some of the most brilliant minds on earth after easy money to the exclusion (and damage) of the real society and its productive endeavors. And sustaining it brings another massive brain drain, as armies of accountants, tax lawyers, bankruptcy lawyers etc. also go after the easy money. Probably nothing has done more damage to the country and the world.

Wall street is the obvious target but I think the OWS protesters could narrow it down to one - get money out of politics. All other demands would fall out naturally. Politicians would represent the people that elected them and regulators would do their job or get fired.

You can't get money out of politics until you get purchasable power out of politics. That has to come first, otherwise the power goes to the ones clever enough to hide the fact that they've bought off another of our 'representatives'.

You can't get money and influence out of government period. That's why government should be the target of the protests. If you smack down all the Wall Streeters there will be plenty of other special interests still manipulating the game.

A system predicated on the monopolistic application of legitimized violence can only exist by the application of legitimized violence. Regular folks should expect to get screwed as long as the protection racket (aka the Safety Net) exists.

Hi arkadaba. I believe it was our Founders' intention or hope to keep money and prestige out of politics.

Geez, it took several days by horse-drawn coach over rough dirt roads for elected officials to reach the capital. They worked at the capital all summer, away from their family and businesses/farms, and returned home in the Fall. Another long, rough, cold ride home. I think our Founders assumed most congressmen would either call it quits after a term or two, or assumed such an annual drudgery would not attract so many savvy, money-hungry, thieving, influence-seeking, unprincipled hypocrites to office. Maybe that's why the Founders did not write term limits into the Constitution.

you have cut to the chase. all the apoplectic apologetics about "capitalism" above you are misplaced. (as gw notes) this slouchy rough beast we see is not capitalism. it is robbing people with a fountain pen. it is crony socialism. it is banksterism. it is the corruption by the very rich of the use of force by the state to further enrich themselves and avoid any prosecution for their crimes. it is monopoly, the arch enemy of free market capitalism.

I've known about this event months before it kicked off on Sept 17th. I've been holding off posting on it because I've been waiting since last Sunday to see if ZH would post an article I wrote on this subject. Finally, after reading all GW's articles this week, and B. Krasting's, I just couldn't keep my mouth shut any longer. Then I learn about my own Oath Keepers. Ahhhh!

Good comparisons, Dapper Dan. But I would be suspect of comparing the USA GDP of 1970 to that of 2009 without some explanation because the latter figure represents an inordinate increase in government spending, leaving the false impression that America is “producing” more when it’s really only massive government debt and inflation for stimulus, wars, welfare handouts, bank bailouts, credit, etc..

As ZH blogger MrBoompi 6/22/2011 put it: “Until they remove government spending and ‘banking contributions’ from GDP calculations they're not worth the paper they're printed on anyway. These ‘organizations’ suck money from the ever-shrinking productive part of the economy.”

“Consumer” spending, meaning “the money that people pull out of their paychecks and bankaccounts to pay for domestically-produced goods.and services,” comes to only 40% of the total of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) so-called ‘personal consumption expenditures,” not 70% as it claims.

First, the category of “personal consumption expenditures” includes pretty much all of the $2.5 trillion healthcare spending, including the roughly half which comes via government. When Medicare writes a check for your mom’s knee replacement, that gets counted as consumer spending in the GDP stats.

At a time when we are wrangling over health care reform, it’s misleading to say that “consumer spending is 70% of GDP”, when what we really mean is that “consumer spending plus government health care spending is 70% of GDP.”

Second, an awful lot of those back-to-school dollars are going to imported clothing and school supplies (how many of those laptops and iPods do you think are made in the U.S.?). A dollar of consumer spending does not translate into a dollar of domestic production.

Incidentally, public debt is getting even worse. Debt held by the public on 10/06/11, i.e., yesterday, was $10,128,447,025,572.00; Intragovernmental Holdings $4,710,329,340,283.71; Total Public Debt Outstanding $14,836,776,365,856.51. $14.8 Trillion!

The funny thing is I have shown this to other people last night with the off # of 1.5 trill and they were still shocked with the increase of debt for the 9 yr time frame, wait till I show them the corrected numbers!

My point on the population and GDP is this, we only added 100 million people in the 9 years

but added 13 trillion in GDP, where did all that freaking money come from?

Am I on the wrong path here? we spent 1 trill in 1970, but than we spent 14 trill 40 years latter.

It's because of inflation and because of change in the way people think about credit. Back in the day business saved capital for investment or took on stringent loans. Today business is financed by cheap credit. That's why Bernanke promised a sub .25% interest rate through 2013.

Regular folks used to avoid credit as well except for big purchases like cars and homes. It used to be considered best practice to pay in cash.

This change in perception of credit led to an expansion of credit which means that more debt backed money was created to provide that credit. The excess money made available to businesses and consumers led to misallocations of resources which eventually reveal themselves to be bubbles which then burst. The government has tried to re-inflate the burst bubbles with even more credit. This isn't working but they keep pumping more cash into the broken system with less effect as time goes on.

Here's the gist -- banks have a 10% reserve requirement -- they have to keep 10% of their holdings on hand and can lend out the rest. Most folks thinks this means that if a bank has assets of $100 they can lend out $90. But it really means that a bank with $100 in asserts can lend out $900. Crazy but true.